Dr. Henry Lee talks about the first case he investigated in Connecticut: a kidnapping and rape in Litchfield County.

Dr. Henry Lee talks about the first case he investigated in Connecticut: a kidnapping and rape in Litchfield County.

DAVE ALTIMARI, daltimari@courant.comThe Hartford Courant

Long before he became an internationally known forensic scientist sought out by the likes of the Kennedys and O.J. Simpson, Henry Lee began his career in a converted bathroom at the Bethany state police barracks.

Virtually a one-man operation with a microscope and some camera equipment to analyze black and white photographs, Lee set about to keep a promise he made to Gov. Ella Grasso the day she officially made him a state employee in 1979 — to build the best forensic laboratory in the country.

Now nearly 35 years later Lee is retired from state service but still working on examining evidence from criminal cases from around the country at the forensic institute at the University of New Haven that bears his name.

In Meriden the state police forensic laboratory that he begged and borrowed to get built with the help of four governors is 74,000 square feet of laboratories in multiple buildings with all the latest in technological advances in everything from DNA analysis to investigating computer crimes.

All started by a man who arrived in Connecticut from Hong Kong with $65 in his pocket to teach at a small university in New Haven.

"Connecticut has always had state-of-the-art forensic facilities, and that is a credit to the criminal justice system and state leaders for wanting to be on the forefront on this, but there is no doubt that none of it would have happened without Henry's tireless work and his vision,'' said former Appellate Court Justice Anne Dranginis.

Dranginis was the prosecutor on the losing end of the first Connecticut case on which Lee testified, not long after he took a job as professor of forensic science at the University of New Haven.

Lee was a witness for the defense.

"In 1975 when I come here, I volunteer my services to the state and to most prosecutors, but they turn me down," Lee said during a recent two-hour interview in his office at the Henry Lee Forensic Institute on the campus of the University of New Haven.

The walls of his office are adorned with plaques and awards he has picked up over the years. There are photos of him with famous attorneys he has worked with and one on his desk of his wife, Margaret, and their two children.

"Then a public defender, Charlie Gill, contacted me and ask for help with a sexual assault case in Litchfield," Lee said. "At that time whatever the police said you had to accept because there was no way to check."

The legend of Henry Lee was about to be born.

Panties In The Tree

"Somebody at UNH told me about this Chinese guy who was a Ph.D. who knew about forensics that was teaching there," Gill said. "I went to see him and I could barely understand a word he said the first time I met him."

Gill, who went on to become a Superior Court judge, wanted Lee to testify about the "panties in the tree" case, in which Gill was defending a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman he and a friend had met at a bar.

Gill said it became known as the panties in the tree case because the woman's underwear was found in a tree near where the two men had picked her up in their car.

"Henry told me to get the panties so he could examine them," Gill said. "I got them from the court and drove them down to UNH, and Henry was waiting for me. His wife and kids were sitting in the car because he was about to go to New York to be grand marshal of some parade, but he wanted to examine those panties first."

Gill said Lee showed up to testify and "of course he was dramatic" and tore apart the state's case. Gill said Lee found seminal evidence from at least four or five other people on the panties. Lee also criticized the initial examination that was done of the woman after she made the allegations, Gill recalled.

The two men were acquitted. The case led police to establish rape kits for all detectives and later hospital personnel to use when collecting evidence in potential sexual assault cases.

"Henry was well ahead of his time even then," Gill said.

Years later Gill's son James Gill interned with Lee at the forensic laboratory. He is now the state's chief medical examiner.

The losing attorney at that Litchfield trial — Dranginis, then an assistant state's attorney — took notice of the defense's star witness. A few months later she held a meeting with state's attorneys from each of the nine judicial districts and told them they needed to get Henry Lee on their side.

"I remember after the jury verdict, I turned to my assistant and [said], 'We will never try another case without him,' " Dranginis said in a recent interview.

Dranginis said she'd never heard of Lee and didn't know much about what he was doing. When he started testifying, she knew her case was in trouble.

"He was just a very effective testifier. He always knew who was deciding the case and he connected with those jurors," Dranginis said. "Suddenly he opened this whole new component of proof. There had been a lot of criticism of the state police at that time for their handling of the evidence in the Peter Reilly case, and Henry came in talking about how to collect and preserve evidence."

Lee, who was recruited by longtime New Haven State's Attorney Arnold Markle, says that his first lab was a converted bathroom at Troop I barracks in Bethany.

"The hole for the toilet was still there, so we just put a board over it, and that's where we started," Lee said.

The primitive lab had a microscope, a few cameras, and tables and chairs rummaged from the UNH campus and other state buildings. Initially the lab developed black and white crime scene photos, did document analysis and fingerprinting.

In 1979 Grasso appointed Lee as the state's first chief criminologist, officially making him a state employee. Lee said he took a big pay cut from his position as a professor to work for the state at that time — his starting salary was $19,000.

But he persuaded Grasso to agree to let him work on cases outside the state to earn either extra money for himself or to buy equipment for the laboratory.

It wasn't long before Lee's new office got its first big case in June 1980, when 29-year-old Elizabeth Hart disappeared from her Glastonbury home. When her husband came home he found their 14-month-old son dead in the driveway, run over by a car.

Her body was found a few days later in Andover, and she had been raped and shot several times. Police arrested a neighbor, 19-year-old Larry Gates, and used forensic evidence such as hair samples, blood samples and fingerprints found in Elizabeth Hart's car to tie him to the crime. He eventually pleaded guilty.

"After that case everybody in the state started sending cases to us," Lee said. "Eventually we got cases from more than 42 countries."

Building A World-Class Lab

Lee traveled all over New England assisting police departments with cases. In lieu of payment, he asked for equipment for the laboratory. In the early 1980s, with help from Markle, the state got federal grant money for arson investigations. The lab established one of the first arson dog programs in the country.

"Our arson unit became world famous," Lee said. "Normally the clearance rate in arsons at that time was 20 percent. In Connecticut it was 70 to 80 percent clearance."

Around the same time, Lee moved his operation out of the old bathroom in Bethany to a former reform school building in Meriden.

Using $50,000 in donations and the muscle of state troopers who volunteered their time, Lee converted it into the state's first forensic laboratory.

Lee hired his first three civilian employees for the laboratory. One was Elaine Pagliaro, one of his former students at UNH, who later took over running the lab the first time Lee retired and who now works with him at the institute.

Federal budget cuts in the mid-1980s nearly forced the state to close the forensic laboratory. Many newspapers, including The Courant wrote about the lab possibly closing.

Businesses started donating money, Lee said, and so did some individuals, including an unemployed man who sent Lee a check for $5, which he never cashed.

"The people of Connecticut are the ones that really saved the laboratory then. We got enough money to keep the lab open," Lee said. "When people ask me why you not leave Connecticut, I tell them it is because the people were loyal to me then, and I can never forget that."

At that time Gov. William O'Neill passed legislation to fund the laboratory annually and to make it a separate entity from the state police with its own policy board to oversee it. Lee started with 12 troopers assigned to the lab, a lieutenant, a sergeant and three civilians. He gradually replaced the troopers when they retired with civilians until the lab was staffed by nearly all civilians.

"I made it clear to Gov. O'Neill and state police that the lab was not only working for state police but also would work for the public defender's office, which made some police angry. But it was important that everyone know the lab is independent," Lee said.

By the late 1980s the lab had expanded to 16 units that analyzed everything from shoe prints to blood to crime scene photos and polygraph exams. Lee also started a trainee program to bring in more help; one of the first trainees was Robert O'Brien, who is now director of the forensic laboratory.

Pagliaro said it was an exciting time to be part of a suddenly growing field.

"I thought nothing of it when the phone rang at 3 a.m. because I knew it would be Henry calling to drag me out to some crime scene," Pagliaro said. "Henry had a holistic approach to forensic science because he believed you needed to go out to the crime scene and see where the evidence came from to truly understand a case."

Police were keeping the laboratory busy.

"At that time we got called out to murders nearly every night, sometimes two or three times a night," Lee said.

By the late 1980s, Lee and his lab were well-known in Connecticut, but a case was about to land on his desk that would make him an international sensation.

A Wood Chipper And DNA

On Nov, 19, 1986, a friend dropped Helle Crafts off at the Newtown home she shared with her husband, Richard Crafts. It was the last time anyone would ever see the Danish flight attendant.

After a few weeks, when some of her friends reported her missing, her husband initially told police he assumed his wife was visiting her family in Denmark. Police were suspicious of Crafts from the beginning, but without a body it seemed an impossible case to solve.

Then a highway worker who had noticed something strange while plowing the highway during a freak November snowstorm came forward. The plow driver told police he had seen someone with a wood chipper down on the banks of Lake Zoar early in the morning as he was plowing on I-84.

State police divers discovered a chain saw on the bottom of the lake. Lee analyzed it and determined there were blood specks in between the teeth. He also was able to recover the serial number from the chain saw, which had been damaged by being underwater. Investigators traced the chain saw to Richard Crafts.

Investigators scoured the shore of the lake and found less than 3 ounces of human remains, including a tooth with an unusual crown, a toenail covered in pink nail polish, bone chips and more than 2,600 bleached, blond human hairs.

Lee decided to try an extremely new blood-typing technique called DNA testing to see whether he could determine if the remains were Helle Crafts'. The samples were too degraded to make a match, but the lab was able to ascertain that the blood was from a female with the same blood type as Helle Crafts.

Lee said that although people remember that the wood chipper case was likely the first criminal case where DNA was used, "the case broke ground on a lot of new techniques."

"We brought in a wood expert to analyze the striations on the wood chips, a rope expert to analyze the rope fibers. We did bone analysis and fabric analysis," he said. "It was a hard case."

The partial tooth with the dental crown intrigued Lee, who called in a dental expert to examine it. That turned out to be a key because it was determined the crown was likely installed by a dentist in Denmark, where Helle Crafts was from.

That was enough for the medical examiner's office to determine that Helle Crafts was dead, which paved the way for state police to arrest Richard Crafts on murder charges. It was the first time in the state's history a murder case would be tried without a body.

The first trial in New London ended in a mistrial when one juror refused to deliberate anymore and walked out of the courthouse. Crafts was convicted at a second trial and is still serving a 50-year prison sentence.

The salacious details of the wood chipper murder had garnered international media attention, and Connecticut's forensic science guru became a highly sought-out expert.

"That certainly was a very exciting time," Pagliaro said. "We were doing cutting-edge DNA technology and that opened up a lot of opportunities for examining evidence. People were now realizing that they had to rely on scientific analysis of evidence to help solve cases."

The State's $1 Man

Pagliaro said the Connecticut laboratory was one of only five in the country working with the next phase of DNA, called PCR testing.

"While we weren't able to determine whether a blood sample was 1 in 500 million like we can today we could say it was 1 in 500,000, which was a lot better than just saying it was a certain blood type," Pagliaro said.

In the 1990s, Gov. Lowell P. Weicker approved funding for phase two of the lab and Gov. John G. Rowland approved phase three, ultimately giving the state 240,000 square feet of forensic laboratory space. Lee also started one of the country's first computer crime sections and established a sex offender database using DNA testing.

Lee "retired" for the first time in 1996 and was ready to take a new job in Washington, D.C., when his mother called him to ask what he was doing and why would he leave Connecticut. She persuaded him to stay.

Two years later Rowland appointed him state police commissioner, the first Chinese man to hold that position. He stayed as commissioner for two years.

"I went home and told my wife, 'Good news, Margaret: I got a big promotion, Numero Uno cop in the whole state, and I am going to be taking a pay cut,' " Lee said.

A job offer in Florida tempted Lee to retire again, only to be convinced by Rowland to stay on as chief emeritus of the laboratory, which was now being run by his protégé Pagliaro.

When the state faced budget cuts in the late 1990s, Lee went to Rowland and brokered a deal: He would give up his $150,000 annual salary and take only $1 a year if the governor promised not to cut staff at the laboratory.

"That is how I became the state's most important $1 man," Lee said.

He stayed in that position for another eight years.

'Something Not Right'

As he turned responsibilities of the day-to-day operations of the lab over to others, Lee became a celebrity forensic scientist, working for both the prosecution and defense.

He was asked to consult on cases such as the William Kennedy Smith sexual assault case in Palm Beach, Fla., where he testified on the defendant's behalf, and the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case in Colorado, where stumped prosecutors sought his expertise in re-examining physical evidence.

But by far the biggest and most controversial case Lee testified at was the trial of O.J. Simpson, where he testified on behalf of Simpson and raised questions about how Los Angeles police collected evidence from the bloody crime scene.

His infamous statement — "Something not right" — when describing the police investigation was a key factor bolstering the defense's case that Simpson was either framed by police or the evidence couldn't be trusted because of the way it was collected.

As part of his testimony in the Simpson case Lee performed one of his standard routines perfected in courtrooms all over Connecticut through the years — explaining blood splatters by using red ink and paper.

Lee walks down in front of the jury and first uses an eye dropper to drop some "blood" onto the paper to demonstrate a low-velocity blood splatter. He then sprays ink against the paper to show what a high-velocity blood splatter would look like. In the Simpson case, Lee raised questions about how the blood evidence was collected at the scene and whether it was properly analyzed.

After Simpson was acquitted, Lee received some criticism for testifying on his behalf.

But Lee deflected it, saying that his fee in that case, allegedly $250,000, was used to buy equipment for the state laboratory, as were fees from other high-profile cases that he worked on. He also said that the Simpson case and others like it highlight his mantra that a forensic scientist just examines the evidence and doesn't pick sides.

"You cannot take sides, there's always pressure from families of victims, detectives, media," Lee said. "Some even try to offer you gifts or tamper with you. If you don't have that integrity, then you have a big problem."

Lee officially retired from the laboratory in 1998, although he continued to work on high-profile cases.

Goofs And Backlogs

The laboratory has faced some problems since Lee left. In 2009 The Courant reported that a key piece of evidence in the unsolved 1998 murder of Yale student Suzanne Jovin was contaminated at the laboratory.

For years investigators had hoped that DNA material found under one of Jovin's nails would lead to her killer. However, embarrassed lab officials had to acknowledge in 2009 that the DNA actually belonged to a forensic laboratory technician who initially handled the Jovin evidence.

Just before that revelation, Jovin's parents had written a letter to Gov. M. Jodi Rell criticizing the forensic laboratory for its "shortcomings."

"This facility once regarded as the leading forensic unit in the country, is suffering from under-staffing and inadequate funding. As a consequence, the unit is struggling to satisfy the needs of ongoing and emerging investigations, not to speak of 'cold cases' such as the murder of our daughter," Thomas and Donna Jovin wrote.

Then in 2010 The Courant reported that the lab had a serious backlog of DNA cases because it was short-staffed and underfunded. Police departments were told they could have to wait up to nine months to get DNA samples from a homicide scene processed unless they had a suspect in mind.

In addition, latent fingerprints found at crime scenes could take a year to analyze against a national database, and evidence from 110 rape kits had not been tested, some of which had been sitting on a shelf for a year.

The problems led the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors to allow the lab's accreditation to expire. It was restored last year,but not without tarnishing its reputation.

The bad publicity angered Lee, who said "what it took him 30 years to build was being destroyed."

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced that money would be provided to assist the laboratory in eliminating the backlog of DNA cases. More employees were hired and a new director, Guy Vallaro from Massachusetts, was brought on board.

"Dr. Vallaro is the perfect leader to restore our lab to what it once was: the envy of the nation," Malloy said.

Full Circle

Lee has gone back to where he started — the University of New Haven — where the forensics program he started in 1975 has more students applying to it than it can handle. He now chairs the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science, housed at UNH.

The $14 million facility, which opened in 2010, is used to train students, police, lawyers and investigators in the latest forensic practices. There are virtual crime scene labs, where students can step into a crime scene and experience in three dimensions the details of a case such as the "wood-chipper" murder.

On a recent Monday morning Lee was teaching a class of 15 law enforcement officials from Qatar about forensic science. The group was at UNH for a month of training on everything from collecting evidence at a crime scene to properly investigating the cause and origin of a fire.

Lee spends nearly four hours talking to the class, often joking with them about their girlfriends and wives back home. But toward the end of the lecture, as he talked about how technology changes forensic science almost daily, he became serious.

"Technology really advanced so much, but issue still the same issue. It doesn't matter how advanced the technology, the most important thing is you, the individual examiner's integrity and devotion," Lee said. "If you see this as a job and not a profession, then you are in the wrong field. Because here what we do is not 8 to 4 job."